The single best boom-time investment Texas can make is in Texas children and young people. In this 2008 photo, Brianna Carrillo contemplates a pool of foam letters at Farias Early Childhood Center on East Rittenhouse. Photo by R. Clayton McKee/For the Chronicle

Texas, praise be, is once again enjoying an oil boom. In September, our state hit its highest monthly production rate ever, pumping 2.7 million barrels of crude each day. Thanks largely to shale oil, we now produce more than twice as much oil as we did only three years ago. Driving through downtown Houston or the Energy Corridor, you can practically feel the skyscrapers thrumming with profits.

It's a heady moment. But booms never last forever, and Texas, of all states, should know that. Remember the bumper stickers from our 1980s oil bust? "Please God," said one version, "send me one more oil boom. I promise not to blow this one."

We can't afford to waste this boom. It's our big chance to make our state even stronger and better prepared for whatever the future brings.

The single best boom-time investment Texas can make is in our state's children and young people: to make sure that all Texas kids are adequately fed and have decent medical care; to expand early-childhood education, one of the best antidotes to poverty; to ensure that all public-school students attend strong schools; and to see that a would-be college student doesn't have to take on enormous debt in order to get an education.

Most Texas kids face an uphill slog. Over the past decade, the number of Texas kids growing up in poor households has exploded. According to a recent study by the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an astounding 66 percent of kids in our state's public schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. More than a quarter of Texas kids are in families below the poverty line - the poorest of the poor.

Even as oil money rolls in, it's growing harder for those poor kids to get ahead. Early childhood education jump-starts an underprivileged kid's schooling, but in the last five years, though demand has grown, the number of kids in Head Start and Early Head Start dropped last year. The demand was there. The funding wasn't.

The picture doesn't improve once a child starts kindergarten. Since it costs more to educate poor kids than middle-class or wealthy ones, you'd expect Texas to spend more on public schools than the average state. Instead, according to CPPP, we rank 43rd in per-pupil spending.

And after high school? It's more difficult for this generation of Texans to afford college than for any generation that's gone before it. Since 2003, when the state deregulated tuition at public universities, students have covered a skyrocketing share of higher-education costs. While the state's median income has hardly budged in the last decade, the average cost to attend a public university has almost doubled. The average student borrower now graduates owing $24,000 in loans - a burden heavier than any previous generation of Texans has had to bear. Though higher education matters more to our state's future than ever, Texas has been shifting its costs to students and their families. Too many of them can't afford it. And where will that leave Texas?

We should thank God for sending another oil boom. And we should make sure, this time, not to blow it.